The present invention relates generally to systems and methods for sorting findings to one or more medical coders. The present systems and methods enable maximization of coder time and ability in order to facilitate exploration of the findings, and/or exploit the findings to maximize one or more criteria.
Despite rapid growth of innovation in other fields in recent decades, the world of medical information, including patient medical records, billing, referrals, and a host of other information, has enjoyed little to no useful consolidation, reliability, or ease-of-access, leaving medical professionals, hospitals, clinics, and even insurance companies with many issues, such as unreliability of medical information, uncertainty of diagnosis, lack of standard, and a slew of other related problems.
One of the challenges facing those in the medical or related areas is that human intervention is required to perform medical coding. Medical coding (also known as clinical coding, diagnostic coding or health care coding) is the analysis of clinical statements and records to assign standardized codes using a classification system. The resulting coded information is integral to health information management, including statistical analysis by governments and healthcare organizations, research, epidemiological studies, health resource allocation, billing and education, among other uses.
The issues with medical coding arise from the fact that it is a highly manual process, and results in erroneous or improper coding. In order to combat this, multiple quality assurance steps typically need to be employed, which adds to the cost and burden of medical coding. Likewise it is very difficult to generate proper analytics regarding coders or coding due to the often iterative quality assurance steps.
It is therefore apparent that an urgent need exists for a medical coder sorter capable of assigning findings to a medical coder based upon coder abilities and quantifiable objectives. Such systems and methods enable more efficient medical coding, and further enable the generation of reports regarding coding.